FizzyOrange

joined 1 year ago
[–] FizzyOrange 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

They seem exactly the same to me: when a variable is assigned a value, it’s equal to that value now.

Yeah it's confusing because in maths they are the same and use the same symbol but they are 100% not the same in programming, yet they confusingly used the same symbol. In fact they even used the mathematical equality symbol (=) for the thing that is least like equality (i.e. assignment).

To be fair not all languages made that mistake. There are a fair few where assignment is like

x := 20

Or

x <- 20

which is probably the most logical option because it really conveys the "store 20 in x" meaning.

Anyway on to your actual question... They definitely aren't the same in programming. Probably the simplest way to think of it is that assignment is a command: make these things equal! and equality is a question: are these things equal?

So for example equality will never mutate it's arguments. x == y will never change x or y because you're just asking "are they equal?". The value of that equality expression is a bool (true or false) so you can do something like:

a = (x == y)

x == y asks if they are equal and becomes a bool with the answer, and then the = stores that answer inside a.

In contrast = always mutates something. You can do this:

a = 3
a = 4
print(a)

And it will print 4. If you do this:

a = 3
a == 4
print(a)

It will (if the language doesn't complain at you for this mistake) print 3 because the == doesn't actually change a.

[–] FizzyOrange 0 points 3 weeks ago

Interesting how they build a community starting with rebasing on top of Gitea, and then hard-forked later. Probably a good blueprint for forking.

GPL move also seems like a good idea - it reduces the chance of needing yet another fork.

Can they get whoever came up with the excellent name "Codeberg" to fix the terrible name "Forgejo" though? It's not quite as bad a name as GIMP or Got, but still...

Also i absolutely hate how they talk about moderation. You can't just say "someone was banned for some actions". That doesn't inspire confidence at all! Imagine if the police were always saying "one of your peers was sent to prison for a crime" and refused to say who or what they did. That's communist Russia territory...

They claim they can't say because of the right to be forgotten but that's not what the right to be forgotten means.

[–] FizzyOrange 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

... in one benchmark.

[–] FizzyOrange 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It does still have a traditional assignment operator. You can assign values to mutable variables.

Also I would say let-binds are still pretty much assignment; they just support destructuring. Plenty of languages support that to some extent (JavaScript for example) and you wouldn't say they don't have assignment.

I don't think it affects the ability to overload = anyway. I think there aren't any situations in Rust where it would be ambiguous which one you meant. Certainly none of the examples you gave compile with both = and ==. Maybe there's some obscure case we haven't thought of.

[–] FizzyOrange 22 points 3 weeks ago (14 children)

>= and <= match the mathematical operators. The question you want to ask is why doesn't it use = for equality, and the answer is that = is already used for assignment (inherited from C among other languages).

In theory a language could use = for assignment and equality but it might be a bit confusing and error prone. Maybe not though. Someone try it and report back.

[–] FizzyOrange 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

They've been doing that for about the last 6 releases. I wish they'd fix some of the long-standing annoying bugs like the fact that you can't respect .gitignore and search in a subdirectory at the same time. Or the fact that you can't stage a submodule unless you also have that submodule open.

Or how about a less annoying way to configure Run/Debug than launch.json?

Still, can't complain. It's mostly free and still very good overall. I'll definitely be watching Zed... but maybe not too closely until it supports opening large files.

[–] FizzyOrange 1 points 3 weeks ago

where before we ran into compatibility problems with glibc

I wonder if GNU will ever fix that. Surely at some point they have to say "ok we still think things should be open source but we are going to make it suck a little bit less for people that don't build literally everything from source on their local machine"... right? Ok maybe not.

[–] FizzyOrange 0 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Yes, but I was talking about Linux in general. I'm pretty sure Gnome at least has commercial backing.

And Linux advocate never say "don't use Linux; it isn't a commercial product so it isn't as good as Windows" do they? They say "you're an idiot for using Windows; Linux is better".

[–] FizzyOrange 2 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I think he meant the idea of shaming companies for not donating to things.

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